Great Gatsby Business Card Print

What do you get when you combine one of the ‘Great American Novels’ with one of Philly’s finest shops? Certainly no fluke. Here’s a look at For Print Only’s Best of Show winner.

This self-roclaimed “Mom & Pop design shop” may feel like old school Americana but the work they present is fresh and modern with a little vintage cool. For example, this poster features 32 business cards lifted from the party scene of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age classic “The Great Gatsby.”

Many of these cards are quite faithful of the design sense of the Roraring Twenties There’s the ‘Beaver’ card with the Art Deco style that spread throughout Paris at a time when much of the American elite gathered in France and brought the fashions home. The German Bauhaus movement is also present on the ‘H’ card and for Flink to a lesser extent.

The designers even included the elaborate hand lettering drawn on the ‘B,’ ‘A’ and ‘R’ cards. Theres subtle homage to early filmwork as well in the ‘Films’ and ‘Schwartze’ cards styled as if pulled from the silent picture flm reels.

And of course there are even a few tributes to the typefaces of the news mogol William Randolf Hearst’s publishing empire. Most notable are the slim sansserif font of the ‘Baedecker Girls,’ ‘Cohen’ and ‘Beluga’ cards, the chunky slab serif ‘Bunsen’ and ‘Bull,’ and the ‘Muldoon’ one, and what looks like such fonts that became a Neorenaissance for Garamond, Caslon, and Jensen such as ‘DeFontana.’

A few of the cards are immediately recognizable. There’s Jordan Baker’s featuring the colligate-like Brothers and club illustration representing her sports career in golf, and yet soft flourishes are reminescent of the lanquidness Jordan exhibits when the narrator of the story first meets her.